Bullying is an evil on the same level as sexual abuse and deserves a similar response

The need to do everything possible to fight bullying is about as self-evident as a cause can be. Bullying is pernicious, destructive, and in many cases fatal. It ruins lives, not just for the victim but for their family and people around them. Though not limited solely to the teen years, it’s hard to imagine anything that could be more cruelly undermine a young person’s life at a period of maximum vulnerability. At the exact moment when they are wrestling with identity, self-confidence and acceptance – skills that will shape how they live and who they become – they are subjected to a senseless, irrational, wholly destructive attack on the very qualities they need to formulate a strong and confident identity.

Bullying isn’t something that happens for a month or two and then goes away. Like sexual abuse, it stays. The memory remains, as does the emotional damage, often forever. Once of the hallmarks of sexual abuse is the silence that often allows a perpetrator to continue finding victims, safe in the knowledge that shame will prevent their target from speaking out. Bullying depends on much the same sense of invulnerability: the victim is often too shattered to share the secret. Even those who do – Amanda Todd being an excellent example – still often find themselves unable to deal with the emotional impact even while receiving assistance from friends, family and existing support networks. That’s how devastating the impact is.

There may have been a day when these things could be handled by a show of physical force. Bullies are notorious cowards. They often dissolve when someone stands up to them. This might be possible in the school yard, when the issue at hand is one kid picking on another. But the Internet precludes that possibility. The internet allows the cowards to mask their identity, to strike from the safety of anonymity. Anyone more than marginally familiar with the internet knows there is a very ugly side to the online community; a mob mentality that takes a certain joy in the hounding and tormenting of others. We’re talking about people so crude that a memorial page set up for Todd has been plagued by abusive photos and comments, including a photo of a young woman hanging herself with a rope and another of a bottle of bleach and the caption “it’s to die for.”

As usual they hide behind the safety of pseudonyms and false identities. We still don’t know the name of the person who drove Amanda to her death. Depending on that person’s skill in avoiding detection, we may never know. So the old bromides for handling bullies don’t stand up in the internet age. You can’t stand up to someone you can’t identify. Nor can you escape cyber-bullying by moving away: the internet is everywhere, and, as the Todds learned, it can track you wherever you go. It doesn’t end when the school bell rings, and it can’t be ignored simply by closing your Facebook page and putting away the cellphone, since those devices are just as ubiquitous as the internet itself, and turning them off doesn’t make them go away.

Something more is needed, and that something has to strike at the root causes of bullying. That is, the sense on behalf of the abuser that they can get away with it, and that society doesn’t take their actions seriously enough to mount a serious effort to stop it; and, for the victim, the feeling that they are alone in the world, that no one can help them, that the torment will never stop and that the abuse diminishes them rather than than the bully.

The way to do this may be much the same as the tactics used to reduce smoking among young people. The great success in anti-smoking efforts has been to make smoking uncool, to establish in young people the understanding that sucking smoke into your lungs, shivering in the cold while you puff on a cigarette, hacking away because of the damage to your lungs, is just not smart or attractive. The effort has been successful because it begins at a young age, is uncompromising and relentless, and because impressionable young people can see for themselves the impact of smoking. The aim of anti-bullying efforts should be to bring about the same sort of realization, to educate people so they recognize that bullying is an emotional crime, that it says nothing about the victim and everything about the abuser. Parents teach their kids from the earliest age to avoid strangers, not to get into a car with someone they don’t know, to tell an adult if someone approaches them. It works – not always but often. Lives are saved as a result. There should be the same immediate reaction to bullying: rather than suffering in isolation, victims should know that the remedy is to speak up, that there is no shame in being targeted, that it’s not their fault. We don’t suggest people struggle with sexual abuse on their own, why should we take a less vigorous approach to mental and emotional abuse?

It’s sadly typical of sexual abuse that, once one victim finally speaks up, a flood of others follows. There is safety in numbers, and a reassurance in witnessing the courage of others. The same holds true for bullying, and the same level of public awareness and counteroffensive is essential. Amanda Todd was not without help. As is made clear in her weekend interview with the Vancouver Sun, Amanda’s mother was aware of the situation, knowledgeable, engaged, familiar with the internet and deeply involved in trying to protect her daughter. Still, she wasn’t able to protect her child. That fact shows both how devastating and how intractable the problem can be. It demonstrates that the considerable efforts already being made to deal with bullying simply aren’t enough, and that a larger, comprehensive – and relentless – strategy is needed. It has taken decades for society to come to grips with the ugly realities and pervasiveness of sexual abuse. It shouldn’t take as long to own up to the similar impact and commonality of the emotional abuse inherent in bullying, and to act effectively against it.

National Post

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